(3 of 5)
Nickelodeon Sentiment. Although In the Swamp is surrealist in technique, with enigmatic central characters who are symbolic rather than human, the minor figures—rogues all—are marvelously funny and thoroughly human. From this point on, Brecht's plays fork in these two directions: the symbolic-didactic and the raffish-human.
St. Joan of the Stockyards (1929) is wholly in the first category. Pierpont Mauler is a crush-as-crush-can Chicago meat baron. When a careless worker falls into the meat machinery at Mauler's plant, he is tinned with the product. This sort of thing makes Brecht's caricature of capitalists both hopelessly dated and immensely funny to a modern American audience. Joan Dark (Jeanne d'Arc), the girl who stands up to Mauler, is a parody figure mostly modeled on Shaw's Major Barbara—a Salvation Army-type lassie who belongs to an evangelical group called "The Black Straw Hats." She tries to soften Mauler's heart toward the workers' plight, while he tries to harden her mind toward the workers' wickedness. In the end, starved and dying, she proclaims that only violence will improve the world.
But a chorus of Straw Hatters and meat packers drowns out her last words, and she is hypocritically canonized for her martyrdom. Although heavily loaded with nickelodeon sentimentality, St. Joan of the Stockyards is intriguing in the contrast of Shavian optimism and Brechtian pessimism.
Greed v. Mother Love. In Mother Courage (1939), one of his most popular plays and possibly his best, Brecht exhibits the raffish-human strain, and doctrine is relatively in abeyance. Mother Courage is an earthy female Falstaff with Falstaff's coarsely skeptical views of war, honor and courage. However, the Thirty Years' War is on, and since the profit motive is no laughing matter, Mother Courage cashes in on the troops. Trundling her wagon, a kind of mobile 17th century PX, behind the shifting battlefronts, she sells shoes, shirts and booze to the soldiers.
One of her sons becomes an army paymaster, and when his regiment is overrun by the enemy, he is too honest to turn over the cashbox. His captors are bribable, but Mother Courage haggles too long over the price, and the boy dies before the firing squad. Just before, Mother Courage has implied that she will do anything to save her son. It is characteristic Brechtian cynicism to stage a contest between greed and mother love, and have greed win.
In the end she loses her two other children, too (one of them is a symbolically mute daughter, another Brechtian figure of innocence), and Mother Courage trudges on, to one of the author's haunting pieces of doggerel:
Christians, awake! The winter's gone!
The snows depart, the dead sleep on.
And though you may not long survive
Get out of bed and look alive!
To Brecht, Mother Courage was a shameless war profiteer. He was disgusted when audiences invariably wept at play's end as Mother Courage yoked herself once more to her wagon, a mute indomitable symbol of humanity's will to endure.